It appears that eBay is feeling the heat from competitors Amazon.com. Amazon has racked up a huge number of buyers and sellers thanks in part to the company's successful Prime service. EBay is still the most popular online auction site out there, but over the years has raised a significant amount of ire from sellers over their high fees and practices at both its auction site and its PayPal payment portal.

As a result, eBay has announced that it's lowering its fees for sellers by simplifying its final value fees with a percentage fee levied on each item sold that varies depending on product category. As it stands now these final value fees are a percentage of the items selling price. The online auction giant has also announced that some of its listing fees will also be eliminated with most changes taking effect on April 16.

"For most of our sellers the complexity of our fees were keeping them from being on eBay and preventing them from having full transparency into their profitability from selling on eBay," said Michael Jones, vice president of merchant development.

Sellers who list fewer than 12,250 items during any given month will see lower fees according to ChannelAdvisor CEO Scot Wingo.

Under eBay's new plans, sellers will get 50 free item listings per month and if the item sells, eBay will take 10% of the sale price, which still seems rather high. High-volume sellers will see new final value fees that range from 4% to 9% depending on the product category.

Sellers fees aren't the issue why smart people avoid eBay/PayPal like the plague.

The real reason is the abusive policies against sellers. If you're not a seller, you may be aware that eBay's policy makes it "illegal" for a seller to leave you negative feedback.

So if you completely scam the seller, they aren't even given the option to leave negative feedback...sellers can only leave "Positive" or "Neutral" feedback for buyers - no matter what.

And if a seller gets scammed by a buyer and tries to leave accurate feedback in a "Positive" comment, they'll get their account suspended for violating eBay/PayPal policies. Because it's against policy for sellers to act responsibly and make any attempt to inform other potential sellers that a buyer is fraudulent.

When a seller files a fraudulent claim against a seller, the seller will lose and eBay/PayPal will take money from the seller's PayPal account, without their consent, and give it to the buyer. Who on top of it all, probably left negative feedback for the seller just to be *that* much more of a prick.

eBay/PayPal managed to force Americans to only use PayPal for auction payments a long time ago...using the blatantly horrible excuse that somehow checks and money orders are a "security risk" that they had to protect their poor, helpless sellers from. Despite the fact that every other transaction can be paid by check or money order...including your taxes. Apparently eBay/PayPal thinks selling things on eBay is a much more important transaction than paying your taxes.

Australians managed to get the practice banned when eBay/PayPal announced it...because it's clearly only in existence to force sellers to fork over even more money in PayPal fees. And generally just to put more money into PayPal accounts anyway, so that eBay/PayPal can make more money on investing with your money and have more to deny you access to when they randomly decide to shut off access to your PayPal account for no apparent reason.

eBay/PayPal is a monopoly - there is no other credible service for online auctions. Their abuse of that monopoly is horrific. Sellers have no choice but to accept their role as perpetual victim in order to have access to the only real online auction marketplace...and eBay/PayPal's predatory anti-seller policies encourage and endorse abuse of sellers at the hands of fraudulent buyers, who know that eBay/PayPal will always let them get away with whatever they want to do.

quote: Sellers fees aren't the issue why smart people avoid eBay/PayPal like the plague. The real reason is the abusive policies against sellers.

I wouldn't complain too much. I've bought a few used items from eBay. I'm not a big eBay buyer. I've probably bought about $100 off eBay over the last year. Most of the stuff I buy are new and through Amazon or much less so off Newegg. I'll buy items on eBay if I can't find them on Amazon.

The problem with eBay sellers is they tend to fib on the condition of the item. Last year I bought a small vacuum cleaner and the plastic holding a front screw was cracked. I believe the seller had simply glued it together and thought it would slip by: no way with the amount of force you exert. I had to return it the next day which was a bother. I still gave him positive feedback because he paid for return shipping.

Again on eBay, 2 months ago I purchased 5 old foreign currency notes from someone in eastern Europe. He has 2700, 99.8% feedback. Most were OK. However, 1 was listed as "VF" (very fine) and it was clearly not. It had ½" rips in 2 places. Because it only cost me $4, it wasn't worth returning. I also believe some of the other notes had been ironed, a common trick to increase the value. I still gave him positive feedback because I'm not a collector and the notes are for historic value.

Last month I bought some vacuum attachments. The seller said it was "new". The set was clearly "used-like new". However, I plan to also give him positive feedback because they were cheap and still work.

So you see, there is a problem on eBay with the sellers fibbing on the condition of the item. All the above items are small in value. However, on something which is expensive, such as a $400 used guitar, then it would make a difference and could lead to problems. Nevertheless, despite the small problems listed above, I still plan to buy off eBay when I can't find the items on Amazon or Newegg.

I got scammed by a seller (counterfeit dvds), filed a complaint that AFAIK is still be investigated (5-6 years later) and nothing ever happened. I posted negative feedback on the seller and ebay took it down.

Sounds like it is just as bad to be a seller. I don't know why anyone uses ebay. They are the house at the gambling table.

I don't believe that. Until a few years ago, when these policy changes happened, I was a pretty avid buyer and seller on eBay.

There's always been adequate protection for the buyer vs. the seller. Now there's not a single thing a seller can do about an abusive buyer...nothing. Can't even leave feedback.

100% of the control is in the buyer's hands. Sellers can either leave, as I have done (except when desperate to just get rid of something), or continue to participate in the only viable online auction site knowing they're going to get f%cked on a regular basis.

quote: considering how many companies were abusing by leaving negative feedback when it was their fault (Ie, scamming sellers)

Thing is, that wasn't possible under the old system. If there was a scamming seller who consistently left false negative feedback on buyers, they'd soon be buried by the return negative feedback buyers left on them.

Each transaction has one buyer and one seller. For the feedback system to be balanced properly, both the buyer and seller have to be able to leave negative feedback once per transaction.

Instead, what happened was eBay looked at one seller and dozens of people who bought from that seller. They took the "democratic" approach and decided their new policy would make one user unhappy (the seller), while making dozens of users happy (the buyers). So they took away the ability of sellers to leave negative feedback.

If you look at it in terms of one user, one vote, then it seems fair. But once you factor in how much each user uses eBay, then it's pretty obvious how unfair it is. Like saying the guy who rents one video a month should have as much influence on which videos the store stocks as the guy who rents 3 videos a day. Your video store will go broke if you try to run it that way. eBay's buyer feedback rating is currently useless (which fortunately for them means they are no worse off than a brick and mortar business - walk-in customers don't have feedback ratings floating over their heads).

If they really wanted to fix it, they could've simply disassociated the feedbacks from who left it. e.g. A seller's or buyer's stats would say 95% of sales both parties were satisfied, 3% of sales one party was dissatisfied, and 2% of sales both parties were dissatisfied. Only let each user see feedback directed at themselves; don't let other users see if the "one party dissatisfied" was the buyer or seller. Since double-negative revenge feedbacks are the worst possible outcome in that case, that would've encouraged both buyer and seller to work out a mutually acceptable solution to any problems sale.

quote: Thing is, that wasn't possible under the old system. If there was a scamming seller who consistently left false negative feedback on buyers, they'd soon be buried by the return negative feedback buyers left on them.

It usually worked the other way round. Sellers rarely left feedback before buyers left it, and if the buyer was dissatisfied the seller left a bad rating. In effect sellers weren't rating the buying experience but just trying to make sure everyone gives them good feedback.

Sellers still try to get around the rating system, for example by taking their time sending stuff so that by the time it arrives and doesn't work there's no way to provide feedback. I'm pretty sure that there has always been and still is more seller fraud than buyer fraud.

Sellers would get their feedback postings removed when the buyers complained about them. And besides, many sellers just waited to see that the buyer was happy before posting feedback so that everybody had a chance to make things right if something happened during the process.

There is no way "around" the rating system...now or ever, for sellers. A seller can't wait 30 days to ship an item to wait for the feedback window to close...if that's happening to you and you don't do anything about it as the buyer, then you're an idiot and you deserve what you get.

I have seen ridiculously few cases of actual seller fraud, and seemingly infinite amounts of buyer fraud - and the irrefutable fact of the matter is that the current system at eBay/PayPal endorses and enables buyer fraud without even the possibility of repercussions for the fraudulent buyer.

Their listing fees are equally evil. Think about it, they are nothing more than a few hundred kbytes in ebay's hard drive farm. A seller with a large number of cheap goods that sell slowly will not be able to put up all his listings w/o paying a hefty fee. I don't know what eBay is thinking about -- that will actually translate into lower sales because the seller will just put up less listings.

On top of that, PayPal's so called Seller Protection is a joke. I have never gotten protected when a buyer asked his/her credit card company for a charge back. What they ask for "proof" is laughable -- signed purchase order. Please tell me one online retailer that does that before selling something to you. On the other hand, Amazon's charge back protection has a much higher chance protecting the seller (sometimes Amazon would absorb the charge back -- good luck asking PayPal for that.)

I haven't paid very many listing fees in the last few years - listings are usually free.

As a buyer, I just feel safer buying from Amazon, as you get all the reviews, which allow you to do better research on what your buying. While a lot of reviews are useless, there are enough informative ones to be confident in what you are buying.

Listing fees are irrelevant...and often free anyway. Sellers will keep postings up...because they want to sell things. The final value fees and the PayPal fees are the real BS. That's where they're gouging the seller.

But yes, there is no such thing as "seller protection" at eBay/PayPal. The seller will always get f%cked, and eBay will always steal money from the seller's PayPal account and give it to a fraudulent buyer if they ask for it.

As someone whose done a lot of buying and selling on Ebay (528 transactions), I have no problem with the feedback system. As a seller, I don't like high fees, and having to pay fees to both Paypal and Ebay. I've stopped selling things with a small amount of profit, because it's hardly worth it after the fees. As a buyer, their prices are usually higher than amazon - it's gotten to the point that I don't bother checking Ebay anymore.

The next time you sell something, look at the options you have for feedback. You can leave "Positive" feedback or "Neutral" feedback. You're not even given the option for "Negative" feedback.

And it's a massive stroke of luck you haven't been scammed by a fraudulent buyer yet. When you are, eBay will steal money from your PayPal account to give to the criminal without even notifying you, and possibly even suspend your accounts on top of that. And then the scammer will leave negative feedback for you just to be a d1ck, and you won't be able to do as much as even try to warn other potential sellers by leaving factual feedback on the issue.